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But beware of fascination with China, beware of the East that would save us from the narrowness of European categories, beware of the mysticisms, beware of the East that is the obverse of the West, beware of the irrational East, beware of the gurus’ East . . . François Jullien vehemently attacks using China as “the West’s safety valve” or as “an instant solution for Europe’s theoretical aporia.
—Thierry Zarcone, in conversation with François Jullien1
Radical Chic, Radical Orientalism
The Orientalist has a special sibling whom I will, in order to highlight her significance as a kind of representational agency, call the Maoist.
—Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora 2
In Le pont des singes: De la diversité à venir (The monkey bridge: on diversity to come), a short book that appears to have been triggered by a visit to Vietnam, François Jullien refers to himself as an “orientalist” (Jullien 2010, 57). Since Jullien is not only a Hellenist but also a sinologist—a specialist of classical China in particular—the designation is technically correct: as an academic who studies China, Jullien is very much an orientalist. But as Jullien knows very well, that term—“orientalist”—comes with a lot of baggage, and so on the one occasion in his extensive oeuvre where he applies the dubious term to himself (I know of no other instance where he does), it arrives in the context, precisely, of a reflection on orientalism:
En tant qu’orientaliste, je sais ce qu’il faut, au contraire, de patience et de modestie, de décatégorisations et récatégorisations infinies, pour envisager d’entrer dans d’autres cohérences et commencer à déplier sa pensée. (Ibid.; emphasis mine)
As an orientalist, I know that what’s needed, on the contrary, is patience and modesty, infinite decategorizations and recategorizations, to envisage entering into other coherences and to begin to unwork [déplier] one’s thought.
As he indicates just before the passage I have quoted here, this is a question of breaking out of “l’hégémonie historique de l’Occident” (the historical hegemony of the occident; ibid.).
In what follows, I would like to hold Jullien’s work up to the standard he lays out here—of breaking out of the historical hegemony of the West and into what he enables us to describe as the “other coherence” of China. Part of my interest is in considering Jullien’s work as an orientalist and questioning its relationship to orientalism—a project that can hardly be avoided in this context. I will pursue such a consideration in order to lay out the key terms of Jullien’s thought as he has developed them throughout his work—but especially in the context of his reflections on the universal (which came late in his career but will be central to this chapter). English-language readers already have access to Jullien’s book On the Universal (2014a), which captures some of that thinking; but I will be working mostly with three still-untranslated texts: the already-mentioned Le pont des singes (Monkey bridge; 2010) but also the lecture L’écart et l’entre (Divergence and the in-between; 2012), later published in an expanded form as the short book Il n’y a pas d’identité culturelle (There is no cultural identity; 2016a). Starting from what I understand to be the antiorientalist positions that are laid out in that book as well as the lecture, I then return to Jullien’s Vietnam book—a sort of travelogue against orientalist travelogues—to critically assess it through the lens of his own antiorientalism.
As a way to mark his own approach as a scholar of China, Jullien often refers critically to “Chinese utopias” in French thought. In L’écart et l’entre, he notes that those utopias are numerous, but he does not spell them out. Those familiar with contemporary French theory may see a reference here to the Paris-based avant-garde group of philosophers and writers who created the journal Tel Quel (As is) and who had what Jean Chesneaux characterizes as a “love affair” with “Maoist China” in the 1970s (Chesneaux 1987, 21). Ieme van der Poel writes in this context of the “maolâtrie française” (French maolatry; van der Poel 1993, 432) of Tel Quel writers Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Marcelin Pleynet, Philippe Sollers, and François Wahl, who together undertook a three-week trip to China in 1974 and reported back about it in their writings (Jacques Lacan was supposed to go but didn’t; in an interview, Sollers points out that “the person who was most interested in China was Lacan”; Kao 1981, 34). Across their works, these writers produced a largely “idealized” and “fantasy-like” (ibid., 431, my translation; on 435, van der Poel has “phantasmatic”) image of China that has by now been well criticized. (The exception was, perhaps, Wahl, who attacked his colleagues’ “sinophilia” but was accused by them of “sinophobia,” with antiorientalist tendencies evident in both positions; Hayot 2004, 153.)
There is plenty of scholarship on Tel Quel, and my goal is not to review all of it here. Apart from van der Poel, who seeks to understand why China was able to take on “the magical aspect of a modern Utopia in the writings of the Telquelians” (van der Poel 1993, 435), United States–based critics Lisa Lowe and Eric Hayot have already explored these Chinese hallucinations (Barthes himself uses the term; Hayot 2004, 154) or dreams, with Hayot dedicating a full third of his book Chinese Dreams to Tel Quel (he writes of Tel Quel’s “dream logic” [ibid., 122] in its approach to China) and Lowe discussing Tel Quel as a separate case alongside Kristeva and Barthes in Critical Terrains (Lowe 1991). Both Hayot and Lowe refer in this context to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article “French Feminism in an International Frame,” which skewered Kristeva’s book About Chinese Women, a direct result of Tel Quel’s China trip (Spivak 1981). Spivak arguably played a leading role in the later debates about Tel Quel as well as Western representations of China in general not just due to this review but also due to her critical comments, in her introduction to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, about Derrida’s use of China in that book (see Chow 2001 and Bohm, Staten, and Chow 2001; see also Meighoo 2008 and Jirn 2015).3
Lowe’s account in particular can be said to continue Spivak’s argument in that it criticizes the orientalist features of Kristeva’s, Barthes’, and Tel Quel’s accounts of China (the ways in which they are “disturbingly reminiscent of [earlier French orientalism’s] postures and rhetorics”; Lowe 1991, 137). Those features are all the more damning given the antiorientalism of some of Barthes’ work before Empire of Signs (his book about Japan) or his writings on China—specifically the entry “Continent perdu” (Lost continent) in Mythologies. This “irony” leads Lowe to speak of a “postcolonial form of orientalism” to describe such orientalist antiorientalist formations. Lowe criticizes Kristeva and Barthes for “constitut[ing] China as an irreducibly different Other outside Western signification and the coupling of signifier and signified” (ibid., 138). She further criticizes them for construing China as “feminine or maternal” and “disrupt[ing] the ‘phallocentric’ occidental social system” (139). Lowe’s analysis of Barthes is particularly provocative in that it traces the shift in his writing “from the targeting of orientalism as an object of criticism in the late 1950s to the dramatic practice of orientalism as a writing strategy in the mid-1970s” (153) in an attempt to escape the dominant Western point of view:
Ironically, Barthes’ attempt to resolve the dilemma of criticizing Western ideology while escaping the tyranny of binary logic takes a form not unlike that of traditional orientalism: through an invocation of the Orient as a utopian space, Barthes constitutes an imaginary third position. The imagined Orient—as critique of the Occident—becomes an emblem of his “poetics of escape,” a desire to transcend semiology and the ideology of the signifier and the signified, to invent a place that exceeds binary structure itself. (154)
Lowe points out that in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes “one of the designations for this space is atopia,” which is deemed superior to utopia because utopia “proceeds from meaning and governs it”—whereas Barthes’ attempt is precisely to get away from such a space governed by meaning (Lowe 1991, 158).4 And so a mythical no-place is invented that is called “Japan.” As Hayot points out, Barthes is very aware that his Japan is a construction; indeed, he explicitly presents it as such (Hayot 2004, 125). Still, Japan is evoked as
an imaginary topos of “untranslatable” difference. . . . The imagination of Japan is an occasion to wish, as in a dream, the toppling of the West: the undoing of its systems of language and discourse, its institutions of meanings, its symbolic paternal order. (Lowe 1991, 159)
As such an “antitext to the West, however,” Lowe writes, “Japan is ultimately not an ‘atopia’ but a ‘utopia,’” precisely in the sense that Barthes gives to this term: it’s the product of an “oppositional desire, still caught within the binary logic he seeks to avoid” (ibid., 159). In short, “Barthes’ Japan is a reactive formation,” and for that reason, Lowe argues that it fails as an atopia—and succumbs to orientalism.5
A similar problem affects Barthes’ writings on China: China is, in Barthes’ own terms, “hallucinated” in his work—but entirely within Western terms, as the West’s opposite. It is “considered exclusively in terms of occidental cultural systems,” as Lowe puts it (Lowe 1991, 162). Barthes “does not offer an explanation of how China is subversive within its own autonomous cultural system” (ibid., 162). Rather, it’s “invoked according to a logic of opposition” (163). In its blandness, which (as I have discussed in my introduction) Barthes identifies as China’s aesthetic trait, it offers “a commentary whose tone would be no comment” (Barthes quoted in ibid., 167; emphasis original).6 “Again,” Lowe writes, “as in traditional orientalism, the Western writer’s desire for the oriental Other structures the Other as forever separated, unpossessed, and estranged” (ibid., 167). “From this discussion of Kristeva, Barthes, and Tel Quel,” Lowe concludes, “we understand that even on the Left the orientalist gaze may reemerge, even when the purpose of its project is to criticize state power and social domination” (189). “The continuing utopian tendency of projecting revolutionary, cultural, or ethnic purity onto other sites, such as the Third World, must be scrutinized and challenged” (ibid.).
Hayot too seeks to understand—in the wake of scholars like Patrick French, Philippe Forest, and Danielle Marx-Scouras—the melding of “the imaginary and the real” (Hayot 2004, 128–29) that we find in Tel Quel’s accounts of China. He considers such melding to have been enabled by
the theoretical ground laid by Foucault (associated with Tel Quel early on but no longer involved by the time of the journal’s Maoist turn) and Barthes, among others, in which traditional notions of representation and reality gave way to more complicated projections of linguistic systems and dream worlds, blurring the line between actual and imaginary China. (Ibid., 129)
This is very much in line with Edward Said’s Foucault-inspired book Orientalism, which is interested in the “interchange between the academic and the more or less imaginative meanings of Orientalism” (Said 1978, 3)—between research on the Orient and then also what Said refers to as “a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident,’” which is the starting point for “elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its peoples, customs, ‘mind,’ destiny, and so on” (ibid., 2). What Said refers to as the “traffic” between the two produces what is, in his view, “the third meaning of Orientalism,” “which is something more historically and materially defined than either of the other two”: “Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (3). It’s at that point that Said brings up “Michel Foucault’s notion of a discourse” (ibid.), noting that he found it useful even if he will also criticize Foucault for not believing enough in “the determining imprint of individual writers upon the otherwise anonymous collective body of texts constituting a discursive formation like Orientalism” (ibid., 23). Overall, one can see here how much Said’s own book—which dates from 1978, just four years after Tel Quel travels to China—is in line with the work by Foucault to which Hayot alludes.
What Hayot takes issue with, rather, is that for Tel Quel “the very theory that supported such a sense of China seemed to be coming from China itself, as if China were justifying, once again in advance, the geo-theoretical conception that made itself possible” (Hayot 2003, 129). “Tel Quel’s ‘China’ was therefore its own cause and its own effect” (ibid.). This is Hayot’s way of drawing out the orientalism of Tel Quel’s accounts of China: in Tel Quel’s perspective, China ultimately becomes no more than a justification for an already-developed theoretical point of view. What Kristeva, Barthes, and Tel Quel ultimately find in China is nothing but themselves, to continue Spivak’s criticism of Kristeva, and illustrates “the Western intellectual’s self-centeredness in the face of the other” (155). They are psychotically hallucinating a version of China to confirm what they already knew—basically, the critical take on the West that they had already developed (129). Hayot partly relies on Rey Chow’s Woman and Chinese Modernity to emphasize that China is “not the magical utopia Kristeva imagines it to be” (142). Instead, “China is just another place” (ibid.).
If Tel Quel may have been one likely referent of those “Chinese utopias” in French thought from which Jullien seeks to distance himself, it’s worth pointing out that Kristeva, Barthes, and their colleagues were certainly not the first to fall in love with China.7 When Chesneaux, in what has become a key text in the field, writes about this love affair, he is writing not only about the 1970s but also the ’60s and ’50s and traces this contemporary sinophily back to the nineteenth and especially eighteenth centuries. The love affair is complex, as Chesneaux points out, and its contemporary realizations need to be understood within the French context specifically as a “rejection on the part of the French intellectuals of Soviet-styled communism,” for example, but also out of an interest in China as “a valuable experiment in Marxist economic theory” (Chesneaux 1987, 21). He goes on to note that
China also met a basic aspiration among French left-wing intellectuals, which I would describe as political exoticism—that is, the tendency to look for a political homeland and model of reference in distant, exotic countries. At times in Cuba, at one time in Algeria, in Vietnam, then in China; each provided a substitute for the ideal society France was unable to develop at home, especially after the failure of the May ’68 movement—which had been so popular with most intellectuals, and not only with students. (Ibid.)
Certainly Tel Quel fits the latter bill. However, Chesneaux’s overall point is that France’s love affair with China extends beyond the journal to what Alex Hughes (commenting on Chesneaux) refers to as “the mid-century moment . . . [that] witnessed a plethora of voyages en Chine undertaken by French luminaries in the wake of the Bandung conference of May 1955” (Hughes 2003, 85; emphasis original). Hughes writes,
That conference spawned the invitation famously proffered to the West by Zhou Enlai [first premier of the People’s Republic of China], ventriloquized by the French journalist Robert Guillain, who acted on it in the following terms: “La Chine est ouverte au visiteurs. Venez voir!” (China is open to visitors. Come see for yourself!). (Ibid.)
Hughes adds that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were two of those early visitors. In his article on Tel Quel, Ieme van der Poel suggests that it is because Sartre and de Beauvoir had already discovered China in the 1950s that, around the time when Tel Quel falls in love with Mao, Les Temps Modernes (the journal edited by Sartre and de Beauvoir) “s’intéresse peu à la Chine” (wasn’t interested much in China): “Il paraît que pour Les Temps Modernes, le culte de la Chine représente une étape du tier-mondisme qui était déjà passée” (it appears that, for Les Temps Modernes, the China cult represented a stage of third worldism that had already passed”; van der Poel 1993, 433).
Still, “by and large, Maoist China was very chic in French cultural life of the 1950s and 1960s,” Chesneaux writes (Chesneaux 1987, 22). Chesneaux’s use of the term “chic” in connection with Mao enables one, with a wink to US novelist and critic Tom Wolfe, to use the phrase “radical chic” to capture Tel Quel’s love affair with Mao. Published in New York Magazine in 1970, Wolfe’s text “Radical Chic” satirizes a party at Leonard Bernstein’s where the Black Panthers were the guests of honor (Wolfe 1970). Wolfe’s account includes toward the end a rendering of how the Bernsteins, in the aftermath of the party, quickly become the object of criticism: the New York Times, which published two noncritical accounts of the party, followed up with an editorial that attacks the Bernsteins’ “romanticization” of the Panthers and deems it “an affront to the majority of Black Americans” (ibid.). The party creates, according to the editorial, “one more distortion of the Negro [sic] image. Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People [i.e., New York’s Park Avenue elite] create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful” (ibid.). Things got even worse for the Bernsteins when Black Power groups turned out to be voicing “support for the Arabs against Israel” (ibid.), ultimately forcing Bernstein to distance himself from Black Panther politics while he insisted nevertheless that it has a place in democratic culture.
Much in Wolfe’s piece, it’s worth noting, revolves around the representation of the Black Panthers, who are hailed in Wolfe’s satirical account of “Lenny’s Party” as “real”: “they’re real, these Black Panthers . . . who actually put their lives on the line . . . [with] real Afros . . . these are real men” (Wolfe 1970). Wolfe’s “Radical Chic” thus stages a problem of representation that’s not entirely separate from the orientalist issues that haunt Tel Quel’s love affair with Mao: there, too, the issue is, if not so much with the reality of China, with its hallucinatory and dreamlike construction, its psychotic projection, as “real”—more real than the West. As Robeson Taj Frazier in his book The East Is Black has shown, China furthermore plays an important role in “the black radical imagination” itself, precisely during the same three decades that I’ve discussed (Frazier’s book ranges from the 1950s to the 1970s). This means that the historically and philosophically parallel cases that I’ve just laid out (“the black panther” and “the dragon of China,” to draw from William Worthy’s 1967 Esquire magazine article; Worthy quoted in Frazier 2015, 109) need to be considered as imbricated into each other as well. Frazier notes early on in his book that orientalism is a real issue in this context (ibid., 64) and in fact uses the phrase “radical orientalism” as part of his discussion (16). He does not consider, however, how, for example, the Black Panthers themselves were exoticized and orientalized in the United States.
Chesneaux’s final judgment on Tel Quel does not pull any punches:
The whole affair was certainly a strange combination of affectation and naivety, of misinformation and self-complacency, which deserves blame and regret and nothing else. We [French intellectuals] were definitely lacking intellectual rigor, caution, and integrity. Not only did we satisfy ourselves with a rosy picture of China . . . We failed completely to assess properly our responsibility towards French public opinion. (Chesneaux 1987, 23)
When Lisa Lowe quotes Tel Quel’s statement from 1971 that in regard to the Chinese Cultural Proletarian Revolution they will do everything “to illuminate it, to analyze it, and to support it” (Lowe 1991, 136), she surely does so to draw out the extent to which they failed (and perhaps also to shed light on her own project, which, while exposing the orientalism of Tel Quel, would never purport to speak the truth about China; Said had of course already taught us as much in Orientalism). Chesneaux uses the occasion of his text, which is based on the “Morrison Lecture” that he delivered in 1987 in Canberra (it’s worth noting Chesneaux himself refers to it as “a kind of unofficial ‘Victor Segalen Lecture’”; I will return to the importance of Segalen for the broader context and especially reception of Jullien’s work in chapter 4), to express—quite modestly—his regret about this. Noting that “We were certainly wrong in our simplified approach to the complex realities of Chinese politics and Chinese society,” he also adds, however, that “we were not necessarily wrong in advocating Maoist analyses and Maoist thinking so as to approach critically what we probably knew better than China—namely, France itself” (ibid., 24). In other words, Tel Quel’s project—however flawed—may still have some value beyond its erroneous engagement with China as a critical approach to France.
China as Heterotopia; or, Why Jullien Is Not an Orientalist
Assuming that we now have a good understanding of what Jullien in his work on China does not want to do—he does not want to participate in the tradition of Chinese utopias that is common in French contemporary thought and beyond it—how does Jullien describe his own approach to China? Does it manage to avoid the orientalist trap?
Criticizing the use of China as utopia, Jullien frequently refers to his own understanding of China as a heterotopia, a term he explicitly borrows from Michel Foucault’s Order of Things. This reference, for which Jullien never provides a footnote, goes back to Foucault’s famous preface to Order of Things, where he claims that the
book arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. (Foucault 1973, xv; emphasis original)
The passage referenced here quotes “a certain Chinese encyclopedia”8; in other words, we get here Foucault’s take on “China”—and “without so much as a hint,” as Zhang Longxi has pointed out, “to suggest that the hilarious passage from that ‘Chinese encyclopedia’ may have been made up to represent a Western phantasy of the Other and that the illogical way of sorting out animals in that passage can be as alien to the Chinese mind as it is to the Western mind” (Longxi 1988, 110).9
“China,” by Foucault’s acknowledgment (although it’s worth noting that this is “China” by way of Borges, an Argentine!), has the capacity not just to shatter Western thought (for surely that is what Foucault means by “our thought”) but also to “disturb and threaten with collapse” the oppositional logic of “the Same and the Other” that we’ve seen is essential to orientalism (orientalism constructs the orient in opposition to the West). Jullien seizes Foucault’s “disturbing” and “threatening” characterization of China and aligns it for his purposes.
Disturb and threaten: That is, as Foucault explains later in the preface, what heterotopias do. It’s what sets them aside from utopias. Jullien’s relationship to China is not a love affair. When looked at carefully, China is much too disturbing and troubling to allow for the exoticization and orientalization that the term “love affair,” in Chesneaux, is meant to evoke. In Order of Things, Foucault writes that
Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter, or tangle common names, because they destroy “syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to “hold together.” (Foucault 1973, xviii; emphasis original)
The heterotopic collapse, in Foucault’s description, is not just at the level of the sentence—or of the relation signifier/signified. It also affects the syntax of words and things, words and their referents (not their signifieds). While this needs to be read negatively first and foremost as a disturbance of and threat to Western thought, it also lays out an implicit, positive image of China as the cause of such threat and disturbance.
How exactly that’s supposed to be, Foucault does not make clear: it appears to have something to do with “the wild profusion of existing things”—a weird, vitalist phrase that does not tell us much—and how such wildness challenges the Western order of things, which Foucault suggests is rooted in language. It is, indeed, on the count of language that Foucault in the preface lays out his reference to China just a little bit more. In between the discussion of Borges and his use of the term “heterotopia,” Foucault situates China between the consoling utopia of another kind of order (that the passage in Borges lays out, and a heightened order at that, associated with walls—he is thinking of the Great Wall of China, presumably?—that are reflected, Foucault rather flippantly suggests, in the verticality of Chinese writing) and what Foucault characterizes as the more-disturbing heterotopia that would present a fundamental undermining of the attempt to order, including the ordering drive of language itself and the relation between words and things. But this is not based on any serious study of Chinese. It’s hard to imagine Jullien agreeing with this characterization of the Chinese language.
Moreover, when one actually looks at Foucault’s text “Les hétérotopies” (Heterotopias) in this context, other problematic aspects of the notion emerge. With the notion of heterotopia, Foucault seeks to name places that are “absolutely different”:
places that are opposed to all other places, that are destined in a way to be a kind of counter-spaces. It’s children who know those counter-spaces, those localized utopias, particularly well: it’s the back of the garden, of course; or the attic, naturally; or better even, the Indian tent set up in the middle of the attic; or also, it’s—on Thursday afternoon—the parents’ big bed. It’s on this big bed that one discovers the ocean, because one can swim there between the sheets. And this big bed is also the sky, because one can jump there on the mattress springs; it’s the forest, because one can hide there; it’s the night, because one becomes a ghost between the sheets; and it’s pleasure, finally, because, when the parents come back, one is going to be punished. (Foucault 2009, 24; emphasis original)
It’s worth asking what remains here of the “disturbing” and “threatening” heterotopia that Jullien finds in the preface to Order of Things. If the notion of heterotopia is claimed by Jullien specifically to resist those “Chinese utopias” that succumb to exoticism and orientalism, it’s surely also worth asking about the exoticism and orientalism in Foucault’s description. The association of heterotopias with children—which seems rich with nostalgia, with gardens and attics and “Indian tents”—seems problematic from this point of view. Later in the same essay Foucault suggests that “the most ancient example of heterotopia would be the garden, the millenarian creation that certainly in the Orient had a magical meaning” (Foucault 2009, 29). Another few pages later, the “hammams of the muslims” are mentioned as another example (ibid., 32). If the essay is, generally speaking, not Foucault’s strongest work, the exoticism and orientalism of Foucault’s theorization of heterotopias poses some challenges to Jullien’s adoption of the term “heterotopia” to name his own strategy; the preface of Order of Things is less problematic on this count, but there too questions can be asked.
Let’s not focus too much, however, on Jullien’s brief mentions of Foucault’s heterotopia as a name for his project. What are the terms that Jullien himself develops, and how do they relate to the exoticism and orientalism that Jullien seeks to avoid? Jullien’s project is to play out Western thought (specifically, Greek thought) and Chinese thought (specifically, pre-Buddhist, classical Chinese thought) in a divergence with each other, not to argue—as he clarifies in The Great Image—that the one is somehow better than the other but to show “how they illuminate each other, each revealing the unthought of the other” (Jullien 2009, 40; emphasis original).10 On that last count, it is important to note that Jullien would not characterize his method as comparative, even if he seems at times committed to comparativism (as critics have noted11) and even if the back covers of his books sometimes characterize his work as “comparative philosophy.” As he puts it quite simply in L’écart et l’entre, “je ne compare pas” (I do not compare; Jullien 2012, 59). Or, if he does, it’s “temporairement et sur des segments limités” (temporarily and on limited segments; ibid., 59). Certainly “comparison” does not characterize his overall approach. In The Book of Beginnings he writes that, to his mind, “‘to compare’ is another way of not moving, of not leaving, and therefore of not entering . . . One has remained within one’s own overarching categories, beginning from which one orders things; heterotopia [Foucault’s term again] and disorientation have not come into play” (Jullien 2015, 13).
Against such a “weak” (as one might perhaps call it12) understanding of comparison (which subsumes difference into one term of the comparison and then often universalizes it), Jullien aims for a “European reasoning” that would “de- and re-categorize itself . . . effectively access an elsewhere, another way of thinking” (Jullien 2015, 14; emphasis original). “Good work on Chinese thought,” he writes, “is work that ‘disturbs’ European thought” (ibid., 12). In a discussion of literary comparison (“as if . . . ”) in the Dao De Jing (referenced by Jullien as the Laozi) in The Great Image, Jullien contrasts a mode of comparison that “[aims] to render convincingly, thus allowing us to see better,” to one that “aims to make less precise”: “instead of focusing on determination and permeating us with its presence, it tends on the contrary to detach us from the order of the ‘there is’ and to make us return upstream from its actualization” (Jullien 2009, 32). Jullien captures this difference in This Strange Idea through the opposition of “variety,” which implies essence and refers to “the unitary genus diversifying itself” (Jullien 2016c, 93), and “variance,” “in which the essence of the thing dissipates” (ibid.).13 Whereas the former remains within Western ontology and metaphysics (a claim that I examine in chapter 2), the latter is outside of those. Jullien typically finds it in Chinese thought.
In view of the charge made against Jullien that he generalizes and essentializes both Western and Chinese thought,14 I should repeat that by “Western thought” Jullien mostly means Greek thought, a notion that refers for him to the tradition of philosophical thinking started by Plato. Jullien’s genealogies of Western thought frequently reach back to Plato to reconstruct Western thinking from there. Those reconstructions are hardly unaware of the differences within Western thought: he gives ample attention, for example, to Aristotle’s criticism of Platonism (he speaks in this context of the divergence between Aristotle and Plato; Jullien 2016a, 68). But ultimately he seeks to show that certain aspects of Platonism continue in Aristotle and after, all the way to the present day.
By “Chinese thought,” as I have already indicated, Jullien mostly means classical Chinese thought. He is focused on Daoism but frequently works across traditions that are generally opposed—Confucianism and Daoism, for example (see Jullien 2004b, 94–95). Ultimately, Chinese thought for him is simply all thought that is expressed in Chinese (Jullien 2012, 41). This is a wide umbrella to be sure, and there is some hopping around within his books and most certainly between books. Jullien also often allows the work of an individual author to stand in for a much larger tradition of thought.15 All of this makes Jullien vulnerable to the charge of generalization and essentialization, which (as I’ve already noted) misses the mark in view of his critical project.
No doubt partly in response to criticisms he has received, Jullien has come to lay out some of the key terms of his work—and I’m thinking now of those that relate to the orientalism debate in particular—in some of his recent, shorter books. These include the already-mentioned lecture L’écart et l’entre, which he delivered upon his inauguration as Chair of Alterity at the Collège d’études mondiales at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris on December 8, 2011. It’s worth noting, from the get-go, that “alterity” stands in tension with Jullien’s declared position. He has often noted that alterity is a philosophical construct and does not capture his approach to China; he does not work on China as “alterity,” but his work comes from the fact—rather than the philosophical construction—of China’s geographical elsewhere (whereas alterity “se construit,” China’s elsewhere “se constate”; Jullien 2012, 17). It comes from the fact that for a very long time China did not come into contact with European thought. Jullien’s thinking about China is a thinking of “ailleurs” rather than of “altérité”; as such, China marks (as he puts in the lecture’s opening pages) an “extériorité,” an “outside,” to Western thought (ibid., 15). This is what sparked his interest in it.
This also means that, through China, Jullien wanted to discover “notre étrangeté” (Jullien 2012, 17), the West’s strangeness. This latter point has to do with something else that Jullien frequently mentions—namely, the fact that he turned to China in order to better understand Greek thought (ibid., 13). The particular disturbance or threat that it brings to Greek thought he describes as a “deconstruction from the outside” (this in opposition to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, which is always already inside; 15 and 21). As the title of an interview with Thierry Zarcone has it, China operates like a “philosophical tool” for Jullien—in that, through its “detour” (and Chinese thought is a thought of the detour for Jullien), he seeks to better understand Western thought. The overall trajectory of Jullien’s work seems to confirm this project, since most of his recent books deal with European thinking, which he broached after the detour through China was accomplished. Jullien passes through China to lay bare what he refers to as the West’s “unthought”—“notre impensé” (20). By this he means “that starting from which we think and that, because of this, we do not think” (ibid.; emphasis original). It refers to the hidden assumptions of Western thought. Chinese thought helps him become alert to those.
Expanding on his rejection of the term “alterity” as a philosophical construct, Jullien also rejects the term “difference” in the context of conversations about “cultural diversity” (Jullien 2012, 24). Instead, he proposes to replace it by the notion of “écart,” “divergence” (ibid., 24). Difference, Jullien explains (and here I return to a point I made earlier on), is “un concept identitaire,” “an identitarian concept” (ibid.). There can’t be such a thing as “cultural identity,” because a culture is always a mixed, nonidentitarian formation and it is always a formation in progress; if not, it’s a dead culture, similar to a dead language. The only thing proper to culture is that it is constantly transforming and changing (26). (This applies to a notion like culture, but Jullien also applies it to the individual—or, rather, to the subject, whose “ex-istence” is given meaning within this philosophical framework as never coinciding with itself; Jullien 2016a, 57. He even argues that evolution operates in the same way; ibid., 70.) Difference is a concept that orders, he concludes; it stands in opposition to what Foucault envisioned by the term “heterotopia.” (An interesting claim, given the presence of the Greek word heteros—‘ɛτɛρoς—in “heterotopia”; indeed, this notion of heteros will return later in this chapter as well and deserves to be questioned further. Jullien seems to want to retranslate it as a geographical elsewhere rather than as a philosophically construed alterity, as distance rather than as difference, but there are moments in his work where he slips back into the logic of difference and alterity.16) All cultures are, in that sense, heterotopic (Jullien 2016a, 48). Part of the problem with difference is that it puts us “in a logic of integration,”17 “of classification and specification”—“not of discovery” (Jullien 2012, 29). Difference, when it comes to diversity, is “a lazy concept” (ibid.). Instead, Jullien opts for divergence and puts it to work.
Divergence makes us rethink cultures as what Jullien calls “fecundities.” Whereas difference establishes a “distinction,” divergence establishes a “distance”—a “separation” and a “detachment” (Jullien 2012, 32)—which productively puts that which it separates “into tension” (ibid., 34). As Jullien sees it, this is not a way of ordering but precisely of disordering, of “derangement,” which makes “fecundity” appear (35). It’s an “exploratory,” “inventive,” and “adventurous” notion that produces cultural resources (rather than “values” or “roots”; Jullien 2016a, 6 and 64) for “exploration” and “exploitation” (Jullien 2012, 37) by all. This is an approach that goes against cultural “exceptionalism,” as Jullien repeatedly points out (Jullien 2016a, 47–62). In this context, Jullien speaks of those resources’ “yield” (ibid., 38). There’s a “profit” (39) that comes from them. The language, it’s worth noting, is both agricultural and economical, a crossover that Jullien has also emphasized elsewhere (see Jullien 2007b).
All of this means that when Jullien speaks of “Chinese thought”
je ne lui suppose aucune identité, nul essentialisme de principe—faut-il encore le répéter?—mais je désigne seulement la pensée qui s’est exprimée, actualisée, en Chinois. Non que je suppose, là non plus, quelque déterminisme de la langue sur la pensée, mais parce que la langue, elle aussi—ou plutôt d’abord—est ressource. (Jullien 2012, 41)
I don’t assume it has any identity, I don’t assume any essentialism in principle—must I repeat myself once more?—but I designate only the thought that was expressed, actualized, in Chinese. Nor does it mean that I assume some linguistic determinism of thought, just that language itself is also—or rather first of all—a resource.
“Babel,” he adds, is “the chance of thought”—a quotation to which I will return in chapter 4 (ibid.).
As Jullien points out, his position also takes us out of what he describes as “easy universalism” and “lazy relativism” (Jullien 2012, 44): a universalism that is identity-driven and exports a certain property to the rest of the world, flattening it, rendering it uniform; or a relativism that allows all cultures to exist in their isolated bubbles (ibid.). These points about universalism are further developed in his later text Il n’y a pas d’identité culturelle, subtitled “mais nous défendons les ressources d’une culture” (but we defend the resources of a culture). There, as well as in his book On the Universal (2014a), he distinguishes between a bad universal—which he characterizes as the general, which renders uniform—and a good, stronger conception of the universal as what has been developed in the context of European thought as an “exigency of thought” (Jullien 2016a, 8). This universal does not name a generality but a necessity: something that cannot be otherwise, in the sense of “the universal laws of nature.” (In philosophy, part of the question of course was whether such universality could be found in the realm of morality as well.) Jullien draws out, however, that in spite of the universality of such a strong universal, such a universal is singular, in the sense that it is local, developed within the context of a specific thought (European thought). It derives from European reason. The uniform, by contrast, is not derived from reason but from production (ibid., 11): it’s the standard and the stereotype (ibid.), not a necessity but a commodity. The good, strong universal is turned toward the ideal; the bad universal is merely the repetition of the one. It’s an “extension of the market” (ibid.). The good universal’s political articulation, Jullien argues, is “the common” (12), which—contrary to the uniform—is precisely not what is similar. Here we see its connection to divergence, which separates and detaches and thereby constitutes the condition for an “active and intensive” (73) common. It gives new meaning to the term “dialogue” (79).
The universal thus must be conceived, Jullien writes later in this lecture, “in an encounter with universalism” (Jullien 2016a, 27). Unlike the latter,
L’universel pour lequel il faut militer est, à l’inverse, un universel rebelle, qui n’est jamais comblé; ou disons un universel négatif défaisant le confort de toute positivité arrêtée: non pas totalisateur (saturant), mais au contraire rouvrant du manqué dans toute totalité achevée. Universel régulateur (au sens de l’idée kantienne) qui, parce qu’il n’est jamais satisfait, ne cesse de repousser l’horizon et donne indéfiniment à chercher. (Ibid.)
The universal for which one must militate is, on the contrary, a rebellious universal, which is never filled; or let’s say a negative universal that undoes the comfort of all arrested positivity; not a totalizing (saturating) [universal] but on the contrary one that reopens the lack in all accomplished totality. A regulative universal (in the Kantian sense) that, because it is never satisfied, never ceases to push back the horizon and indefinitely leads to further searching.
This requires, as Jullien puts it, a certain “care” (souci) of the universal as “promoting its ideal aspect into a never-obtained ideal, which asks the common not to limit itself too quickly” (Jullien 2016a, 27). A slightly stronger way of putting it is that the universal may require “defending,” as the subtitle of Jullien’s book has it. But the notion of “defending” requires some explanation here: in Jullien’s dictionary, it means to “activate” its resources; it doesn’t have, he insists, a fearful and defensive (in that sense) meaning.
Divergence ultimately produces what Jullien calls l’entre, “the in-between.” Such an “in-between escapes,” as he explains, “the determination of ‘Being’”—“l’entre échappe à la determination, elle qui fait être” (Jullien 2012, 51). Or, in a pithier formula, “L’entre n’ ‘est’ pas” (“the in-between ‘is’ not,” Jullien 2016a, 39; emphasis original). In philosophical terms, it escapes “ontology” (Jullien 2012, 51), an escape that Jullien also associates with Chinese thought (as I explain in chapter 2). He notes at this point that Chinese language-thought did not isolate the notion of “being” in the way that Western thought has. Instead it has developed a notion of “nothingness,” which he takes care to explain is not simply the opposite of being: it’s a nonontological nothingness (ibid., 52)—the nothingness of the dao, of the flow of all things (the nothingness of life between birth and death, for example).
This association of Jullien’s overall approach with Chinese language-thought in particular shows that the way in which Jullien theorizes his approach as a sinologist working between China and the West actually has affinities with Chinese thinking. In fact, it’s hard not to read it as a rejection of many elements of Western thinking in favor of elements of Chinese thinking (alterity and difference, for example, are replaced by divergence and its associated concepts). At the same time, Jullien also maintains notions of Western/European thought and insists on the resources of Western culture (the notion of the ideal, for example, in his book on Plato). Still, because it was anchored in being (ontology) and focused on metaphysics (on ideal, geometrical forms hiding behind shadow reality, if you follow Plato), Western thought was unable to grasp the in-between that Jullien proposes: it always wanted to go beyond and access the truth of the idea rather than participate in the flow of all things (Jullien 2012, 53). This separates “life,” as a metaphysical notion, from “living” (ibid., 57; see also Jullien 2016b). The in-between, rather, makes us “de-ontologize” (Jullien 2012, 56). Some in the Western tradition were attuned to this: the painter Braque, for example, who said—in a quotation Jullien mentions often—“that which is between the apple and the plate should also be painted” (ibid., 56). But by and large, Western thought did not think the in-between.
For Jullien, the (Chinese) in-between becomes a tool for working on both Chinese and Western thought. As a Western thinker, he deconstructs Western thought from the outside, as a sinologist; but as a sinologist, he does not “sinize” himself, which, he notes “disappoints orientalists” (Jullien 2012, 60). Instead, he is on neither side, working between the two. It’s this in-between that prevents him from succumbing to those “utopies chinoises” that are so common in France (ibid., 61) and that I discussed in the first section of this chapter. It’s at this point that he now also criticizes Foucault’s notion of heterotopia (ibid.) and its exoticist and orientalist tendencies: Instead Jullien posits China as perfectly intelligible. It’s exterior to the West, but it can perfectly well be understood. This seeks to end phantasmatic constructions of China as some mythological, enigmatic outside to Western comprehension. It’s outside to the West, yes, but it’s not outside comprehension. There can be, as Foucault says about heterotopias but also seems to deny in his text, a “science” of China’s heterotopia. Translation is where the “atopian” (Jullien now shifts to this term, critically reappropriating it from Barthes) work of the in-between is most marked, as a practice that both assimilates and disassimilates (63). It’s the logical language for the cultural dialogue that he envisions (Jullien 2016a, 88).
In the final section of his lecture, he also suggests a perhaps-surprising realm of application for his theory of divergence: gender studies (Jullien 2012, 76). Noting gender studies’ desire to do away with sexual difference, he considers the potential fecundity of thinking a divergence between the sexes, a divergence even within a single sex itself, to see what resources this might yield. This would entail a shift from a thinking of sexual difference to a thinking of sexual divergence, which surely deserves more explanation. But the suggestion is not developed.
